Essential to understanding how the commercial media creates meaning is an analysis of what information is considered important: what information is considered relevant to the greatest number of viewers—in short, what is considered news.

WISH-TV 6 News Analysis

Out of a total of 4 hours and 31 minutes of news, the results, plus or minus 1%, are as follows and represented in the pie chart:

Ads: 1hour 28 min 34 sec 33% Crime: 30 min 7 sec 11% Economy: 11 min 53 sec 4% Local: 9 min 51 sec 4% National: 3 min 15 sec 1% Politics: 14 min 26 sec 5% Sports: 1 hour 6 min 9 sec 25% Tease/Banter: 10 min 22 sec 4% Weather: 30 min 31 sec 11%

Public Access of Indianapolis (PAI) has begun the process of collecting data on the news as it is presented by the local affiliate stations of the national networks. PAI is seeking volunteers and partner organizations to fully implement a media monitoring effort to record and analyze the news product of all four of the local affiliate stations. In the interim, PAI developed a program of news snapshots, focusing on the local news of one station for a fixed period of time. First up is WISH-TV, 6 p.m. news. The period studied was weekdays between 1/9/07 and 1/19/07. The news program was analyzed by recording the number of seconds spent in each general category:

1. Ads: Advertisements for products and services, as well as promotions for the station and affiliate networks programming. For example WISH-TV promoted its news program as award winning, CBS coverage of NFL football, and the Best Buy RV sale.
2. Crime: Information about crime, including the judicial process.
3. Economy: Information about building projects, business leaders, plant closings, etc.
4. Local: Information about things that are happening in the immediate Indianapolis community, including fires and traffic accidents.
5. National: Information about events with national or international impact; in the case of this first study, stories about the occupation of Iraq.
6. Politics: State and local politics.
7. Sports: Any information about professional or scholastic athletics.
8. Tease and Banter: A tease is when the program highlights what will be featured later in the newscast. Banter is brief conversation that appears to be spontaneous and occurs between segments, in the case of WISH-TV, most often before the weather.
9. Weather: Information about the weather.

Nick Hess is Vice President of Public Access of Indianapolis.